The Naked Flame

Ready for another day of sessions. Slept well, but a bit longer than I normally do, but my sleep schedule has been adversely affected by the lack of rest through the day, so I guess that was to be expected. I can just suffer through, because I really don't want to start skipping parts of the productive day here; there's too much to see and do as-is.

I had touched PowerShell briefly before, but hadn't really put a lot of effort into it. Although it turns out I didn't end up needing the instructors, and the material was a bit easier than I'd prefer, it was a very useful introduction of all the concepts involved.

I may have to have a look at doing one or more HOL sessions at my own pace... might get more out of that than hearing people speak about these topics because I can go as fast as I can... no boredom.

Part of Expression Blend (3?) ... saw in the Keynote, looks good for rapid prototyping of conceptual UI. But isn't that kinda what xaml and Expression were supposed to be about already?

Deliberately sketchy hand-drawn graphics to avoid users getting too wrapped up in the polish, rather than features. It changes the quality of the feedback!

Loving the app flow setup step at the start. Nicely informal yet fully descriptive. Design time notes... real controls under-the-hood. Seems like with a trained operator it could be an ideal solution to sit down with the end-user with.

Possible to import actual UI sketches or use a tablet. You can actually link actions and transitions to parts of your sketch! You can actually *draw* edit controls or buttons!

I am sure that he was going to go into a lot more detail about the features of Sketchflow; probably data binding, transitions, etc... but I think I am already sold personally. Will have to find out how much it'd cost.

Okay, so... I haven't actually looked at WCF before, but I am not going to tell him... feel free to skip the basics on me ;) ... I need to decide if I want to know... I'm not hear for the sessions to actually teach me stuff.

WCF first... a lot of talk about it being easier to set up, but explained in terms that do not immediately relate to me. I'd love to have him show a 'before and after' sample, that'd make it instantly obvious. Ah, okay... an example after the opaque description... should have done that the other way around. Excellent, default bindings look to make it a lot easier... I can remember feeling it was way too complicated for what I was achieving when I gave it a quick try once... I might actually be enticed to try again.

I wish I could explain this all a little better, but I do not think I know the problem domain well enough to express this in a simple fashion. Basically it looks like there is a lot of useful default behaviour for setting up service endpoints and behaviour.

Built-in service discovery using UDP or a discovery server on the network. I wish we didn't have a roll-our-own server architecture now, because this would take away a lot of the pain we are working through right now.

Hey, the presenters' desktop just taught me something useful. I can have the taskbar to the left of the screen giving me more vertical space on the limited size of this screen... excellent!

Router service... sounds good... maybe this can be used to implement transparent back-end redundancy? He mentions something about content-based routing, maybe that means it can also be made 'sticky' for a given client app to keep 'state' and 'session' in line. I will have to learn more about this stuff. Gonna be a pain to migrate from what we have already invested a lot of time in, but it'll be standard technology supported by Microsoft with many features we will never retrofit into our own solution. Main problem would be that our existing system is object-based, where WCF is interface method based.

Running low on battery... this may end up truncated before the end of the session. I like router filtering config. Very useful for migrating apps between versions of a service where some apps may not be able to work with the new version when it is first released.

He's going to do WF now, but since the battery is low, I will post this now. WF is a little further from what I need for anything right now, although I'm sure he'll manage to convince me I need it right now.

Enterprise Library evolved from the original Application Blocks; unification because blocks were less compatible with each other than desirable. Unity block is new for Dependency Injection in EL4.

Okay... good overview so far. Hope this leads to some concrete examples, because I haven't worked with EL before. I really want to find out if it's worth using over something more agile like NInject.

Okay, Unity debugging apparently not very easy because of complexity. I think that (calling it out explicitly) kinda answers my question on NInject then. I can see in his sample that the stack traces have been simplified, but it still looked quite a bit more intimidating than I had expected... then again, it is probably on par with NInject at this point.

Bit surprised that message formatting was the slowest part of their logging framework. Bit bemused that they are using log4net as a comparison point, since log4net is far from fast (even though its authors are pretty impressed with the performance of their own code).

What is with the recurring Star Trek theme and jokes? ... Nevermind... database sample app now; starship maintenance (or Starfish maintenance if you mispronounce it).

Fluent interfaces apparently starting to become a thing too. Seems like MS will eventually get 'there' too, but a bit afraid that it all is going to be a lot heavier than it needs to be. Still... it looks good from what is shown.

EL apparently allows use of a different injection framework as well, so it is possible to use NInject with the rest of the library. EL 5.0 also vastly simplified internally and at the API.

Configuration looks pretty hideous, but apparently this is something being worked on to make it easier. Showing some samples of the current thinking now. Wizards with tasks that create multi-block configurations.

Interesting picture... graph-like-view to visualise dependencies, can show injection paths. App-config graphical view looks interesting... higher level view on existing config?

Details on entlib.codeplex.com

Wow, session waste of time... he is explaining what modelling is in a general sense... I want to see the tools already... I'm outta here... better things to spend time on than this.

Wonder if they considered someone might feel insulted by which attributes were assigned to which cities in the opening videos.

2500 people here, and apparently 400 didn't manage to get a ticket to the event. Over 200! women attending... (still sounds low to me, but there you go). 27 people from around the world, from as far as Sweden... I wonder if the netbook was the deciding factor.

We've had a lot of 'learnings' over the past year apparently... first big buzzword of the day. Whole thing a lot more sober and corporate than last year. Okay... 'working smarter, not harder' ... ding ding ding...

Far too much corporate speak in the keynote. Last years' guy was much more inspiring about the event. Cannot recall who he was, but miss him now... this is so *yawn*.

He wants us 'blogging it' ... not sure he really does if he knew how boring he is. Thank god... he's handing over to hopefully a more inspiring person; Paul Lamb.

Vain hope... numbers and statistics... more talk of financial crisis. Enough... enough!

I think they all kinda misunderstood their brief in the context of the event... they are talking about efficiency and cost and improvement... when this event is really supposed to be about ideas and innovation. I know they mention it, but it appears to be just lip-service... stop boring me and start inspiring me dammit!

Okay... time to make fun of Apple now it appears. I think PC is about to spazz out. This is more like it.

Selling the cloud... a demo... not interested in the cloud immediately myself, but at least they are talking technology now.

Powershell... more in the ballpark... and no, not using it in my day-to-day life because it was a separate add-on. Luckily now it is part of Win7.

They seem to imply that voice-mail integrated with Outlook actually uses voice-recognition so that you can read the voice-mail before listening to it.

Background removal... wow... I like... automatically cut the background out of clipart... bitmap too? Selling Office 2010. Will have to play with it, looks like a lot of polish.

Next batch of people... Visual Studio presentation, yay! Sarah Ford.

Multi-monitor support; looking forward to that. Extension to drag-drop images into the comments. Win! Twitter straight from VS editor... not sure what I'd use it for, but... okay. Expression-blend with source-control integration. Sketch-flow... haven't tried it yet, but starting to warm to the idea. Looks good.

Just had our picture taken. Wonder if they are going to mesh it together with Photo-Synth. And thanks Nick Hodge!

The average user apparently has 15 windows open. Either I am efficient, or I am below average... I know which I am going to believe. Yay... the little tabby thing at the bottom-right makes windows transparent. One-click premise... clearly streamlining interaction with our information.

Security next... BitLocker-to-go for thumb-drives; not sure if that has a use to me. Removable drive security policy... very nice. Locked drive comes up with a login dialog. Not accessible without the login.

Problem-step recorder. Part of Win7 ... looks useful... everything that was done plus screenshots. Very nice... I could do with that. Never get bug reports with even just a screenshot!

Ah, and we're back to 'learnings' to finish up... I guess that's called symmetry?

Another 5 minutes before we get talked at, so a quick post. Room a bit packed, and chair spacing not compatible with typing on a netbook. Strange oversight considering.

Breakfast was good, but too plentiful with regards to choice. Temptation to eat everything almost too great to resist... I can be strong, I can be strong... Coffee out of the machine looked worthless, so resolved to wait till at the exhibition to get a decent cup.

Just before I go to bed to have some well-deserved rest for tomorrow... a picture of the Netbook we were provided with by Microsoft for tech.ed

Wow, what a long day already, and almost nothing done yet. Started with a drop-off at the train station at 11am this morning, arrived on the Gold Coast at 3pm, got to the hotel at 4pm, picked up a Netbook at the venue at 5pm, then back to the hotel and dinner, then back to the mixer to meet my friend that came her independently.

Finally a chance to sit still and properly admire the full glory of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit on a netbook. Very nice... very smooth!

Apparently, the Win 7 will expire in a month or so, but to make up for that we were given a full complimentary copy on DVD with registration key... flag-ship next-gen OS version for free... and I can already say I am loving it.

I have installed all my favourites; Firefox, Thunderbird, WinAmp, and newly favourite Trillian. Pinned them all to the taskbar for convenience. Still need to do a little bit of optimisation of the various UIs to compensate for the limited vertical resolution, but all-in-all it is a lot more usable than I would have expected.

Now, I need a little rest. Once I have some decent pictures I'll have a go at uploading them. For now... Zzzzzzz.